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X86's Days as a Consumer Microarchitecture are Numbered
- jfpoole 15y agoI'm excited about ARM processors for low-power applications but I can't see ARM replacing x86 processors (even in the consumer space) until ARM performance is comparable to x86 performance. Right now the slowest MacBook Air is 6x faster than the iPad 2; until the difference is 2x or less I just can't see companies or consumers switching to ARM.
- bradleyland 15y agoI think it's more a matter of the bulk of consumer "micro architecture" usage shifting from computers to "devices", a la tablets, mobile phones, cars, appliances, etc. Right now, we frame our picture of consumer micro architecture as devices that look or act like a computer, but that vision is changing rapidly. Cumulatively, these devices far, far outnumber computers.
- CPlatypus 15y ago6x the performance . . . for 8.5x the TDP. It's pretty easy to see why ARM designs are already preferable for almost anything that has a battery, and laptops are outselling desktops already. Sure, there will always be applications where single-thread performance will matter more than total performance or performance per watt for many cores - believe me, we learned that lesson at SiCortex - but those applications are not enough to sustain Intel as we know it. There's a reason they're developing MIC; without it they'd be squeezed between ARM clients and servers with 20+ ARM/MIPS/POWER/SPARC cores per chip (not even counting GPU/FPGA server plays). They need their own many-core product to compete.
- pbharrin 15y agoI will take 6x the performance for 8.5x the TDP. My 3 year old MacBook Pro has plenty of battery life for my use case. You have to look at absolute performance numbers for the application.
- CPlatypus 15y agoDoes it still have plenty of battery life when you're doing something besides commenting on Hacker News? Perhaps more importantly, how fast do you need a single instruction stream to be? I'm writing this on my own three-year-old MacBook Pro, but I know that its battery life is mostly contingent on the CPU remaining idle 99% of the time. For any multi-tasking workload, or even for single-task workloads if the software is written correctly, a more efficient CPU architecture with many smaller cores would offer both greater responsiveness and longer battery life even during my most computationally intensive moments. Maybe you're one of the 1% who really need higher single-thread performance, and not just because of crappy multi-core-naive software, but the market is driven by the other 99%.
- da_dude4242 15y agoHow are they mutually exclusive products?
- divtxt 15y agoThe only thing I use that causes the fans on my Core 2 Duo MacBook Air to kick in is Flash, so I would definitely consider a slower CPU. Also, note that the savings/benefits can be in ways other than more battery life e.g. price, fanless & sealed cpu, etc.
- alf 15y agoThis is really more AMD throwing in the towel vs. Intel. It's really disappointing to see a competitor leave such an important market. I'm much more disappointed to see the X86 market go from 2 to 1, than I am happy to see the ARM market go from 4 to 5.
- rbanffy 15y agoIt's an important market now. AMD is doing the right thing: they are in no position to compete with Intel and the x86 is not going to see big growth unless Intel pulls off a miracle.
- ars 15y agoWhere is AMD throwing in the towel? I know they've had some trouble with their latest designs, but I haven't seen anything about them giving up, just that they are trying again.
- dman 15y agoIf intel manages to beat AMD out of the x86 market then it will be the end of an era. AMD has done a pretty good job of guarding the x86 flanks in critical times - the P4 debacle, the move to 64 bit, operating in low margin parts of the market where intel has few offerings, offering 4 socket servers, currently offering higher number of cores than intel equivalents. Also they do a good job of exploring the design space and have at various times come up with useful innovations. AMD going out would make x86 a much more monolithic entity in the market and much more open to attack from competitors. Even currently AMD's low power brazos designs eke out a segment of the market where Intel has no real offerings ("good" opengl performance on a SOC).
- fpgeek 15y agoOf course, AMD has been in trouble before and those times weren't as significant. I think what could end the era this time is not AMD throwing in the towel as such, but the fact that AMD could throw in the towel because there is somewhere else to go.
- cryptbe 15y agoI'm surprised that nobody's mentioned that X86 and ARM are instruction set architectures, not microarchitectures.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sliverstorm 15y agoThe two are interlinked, though.
- 4ad 15y agoAbsolutely not at all.
- cageface 15y agoWe don't mind using an assortment of different tools to accomplish other tasks. Why should we expect that a one-size-fits all world of ARM tablets and phones is going to completely displace the tools we're using now?
- haberman 15y agoThis reads like a person who has been saying "RISC beats CISC" since the Apple-on-PowerPC days because of ideological opinions about elegance, and is looking for any excuse to re-express that viewpoint. Look, I still think microkernels are better than monolithic kernels, but you don't see me claiming Linux is doomed just because the L4 microkernel is running on 300 million mobile phones worldwide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Kernel_Labs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Kernel_Labs). Monolithic kernels aren't going anywhere, and neither is x86.
- CPlatypus 15y agoX86 is not going away, I agree, but Intel can hardly exercise the kind of dominance they've enjoyed for the last several years when they're facing serious threats at both the low and high end. At the low end, ARM simply beats x86 for anything with a battery. Intel has already lost the phone and tablet markets, and laptops are highly likely to follow. At the high end, look at the http://top500.org/ http://top500.org/. #1 is based on SPARC VIIIfx. #10 is based on the PowerXCell 8i. #2 and #4 both derive much of their power from GPUs. Even that understates the situation, because many of the most powerful computers next year - Blue Waters, Mira, Sequoia - will also be based on non-x86 architectures. Then look at what Tilera or Adapteva are doing with many-core, what Convey is doing with FPGAs, what everyone is doing with GPUs. Intel is going to be a minority in the top ten soon, and what happens in HPC tends to filter down to servers. So Intel has already lost mobile and HPC. Even if Intel keeps all of the desktop market, what percentage of the laptop and server markets could they afford to lose before they follow AMD? Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't, but anybody who can see beyond the "Windows and its imitators" segment of the market would recognize that as a realistic possibility.
- FooBarWidget 15y ago> At the low end, ARM simply beats x86 for anything with a battery. I've seen this claim often, yet I could not find any sources that could back up this claim. Can you post a link to an article or some research that compares performance/watt (as well as actual power usage) between ARM and x86? I'm genuinely interested in this.
- feralchimp 15y ago"Performance per watt" is great, but when I step within 2 meters of a power outlet I want "performance." And many machines (including laptops) spend their lives within 2 meters of a power outlet. At what point did "consumer" start meaning "low end" or "handheld"? The 27" quad-core i7 iMac is a consumer computer. Gaming PCs are consumer computers.
- grannyg00se 15y agoProbably around the same time people started predicting the end of the PC era as smartphones and tablets took off.
- shasta 15y agoPresumably you still care about "performance per dollar" though, and we're approaching a time when "dollars per Watt" isn't negligible.
- stephenjudkins 15y agoThis is an largely vapid and meaningless prediction by someone who doesn't demonstrate anything but the most superficial knowledge of the microprocessor industry. Perhaps he knows something we don't, but as far as I can tell he's only extrapolating current market trends. Obviously Intel (once led by Andy Grove, author of "Only the Paranoid Survive") is aware of the threat posed by ARM. If someone could explain how Intel will fail to meet the challenges of getting x86's performance-per-watt to match ARM's, and how this compares to the challenges ARM vendors face in order to get raw performance up to Intel's level, I would love to read it. However, this post offers little such insight.
- microarchitect 15y agoOne thing that could work against them is their cost structure. Intel is used to throwing a thousand or so engineers on each design. Having so many designers means they can squeeze out every last MHz, but it also means they need big margins and large volumes to recoup their costs. The other big technical issue is the end of Dennard scaling. For most of the last three decades, scaling CMOS processes bought you three things: more transistors, higher frequency and lower power. Things are different now. We can't really scale frequency any more because we've run into the power wall. We used to get lower power at the same frequency by scaling the supply voltage, but this also required us to scale the threshold voltage (a device parameter). Unfortunately we can't scale the threshold voltage willy-nilly like in the past because leakage power increases for lower threshold voltages and is now a significant contributor to total power. We still get more transistors per unit area, but it's not clear whether the economic costs of building up new fabs and switching to a new process are offset by the benefits of having more transistors to play with. The bottomline is that it's not clear whether Intel's biggest competitive advantage, that of having a manufacturing process superior to everyone else, is still that much of an advantage. PS. One thing I find truly amazing is that Dennard predicted that we'd run into all these problems back in his landmark paper in 1974!
- ssp 15y agoOne thing that could work against them is their cost structure. Intel is used to throwing a thousand or so engineers on each design. Exactly. It's also not obvious that the mobile chip market will pay a premium for Intel-calibre fabs. If it won't, then the question becomes whether a TSMC-made Atom is better than a TSMC-made ARM. It's also fairly common to have custom hardware added to SoCs. Is Intel prepared to open up their processes to that sort of thing? Unfortunately we can't scale the threshold voltage willy-nilly like in the past because leakage power increases for lower threshold voltages and is now a significant contributor to total power. This one cuts both ways though. With leakage dominating active power, within a given node, the fabrication process will be relatively more important than microarchitecture, which is a point in Intel's favour.
- issaco 15y agoGood thing it is an 80-bit FP number.
- bryanalves 15y agoI think in a lot of ways this is related to the relative overpowering of desktop computers for daily use. It's been true for years now that computers are highly overpowered for what they are typically used for. Quad core machine with a million gigs of ram for email and a web browser? Sure there are LOTS of good reasons for having legitimate CPU power, but a lot of times any random Ghz level processor is going to provide plenty of responsiveness for daily tasks. The only thing I can think of that people typically do that is processor intensive is HD playback, and that is easily accelerated nowadays. It's not always about absolute performance, it's about "good enough" performance. If ARM is going to supply good enough performance with the additional benefits of being cheaper and more portable, then why NOT use it? This isn't about ARM versus Intel. This is about having adequately powered portables. Intel is losing the low-end CPU market. That much is true. But the low-end CPU market is the new middle-end CPU market. I think we are going to see an age where more and more people have "low-end" portables as their main computers. The barrier between low-end, middle-end, and high-end has shifted significantly I think. A few years ago, we all had uses for high-end computers. Nowadays, what would be considered high-end is a waste for most people. Also, we can't forget the impact of the cloud on this. We don't need a lot of computing power locally now. For many of the types of applications that one would need high cpu for, the cloud potentially provides those solutions for us. I, for one, don't see myself trading in my desktop at work anytime soon. But I do see myself using my laptop a lot more than my desktop at home. My couch is a lot more comfortable than my computer chair.
- wvenable 15y agoI disagree. A few years ago, what we had for high-end computers was practically equivalent what we currently hold in our pockets. It wasn't long ago I got my first dual core desktop but dual core CPUs in smartphones and tablets is now standard along with powerful GPUs and lots of RAM. And it's not enough. Every year, each device needs to be significantly more powerful than the last. The idea that we've reached some plateau of mobile computing power doesn't hold up to even recent history. And that's the real problem for Intel. Mobile computing power is improving an incredible rate -- probably faster than anyone could have predicted -- and soon enough they'll reach a level where ARM and Intel are actually competing at the same level. We're not there yet but it's close. At that point we'll see if Intel has what it takes to stay in the game.
- georgieporgie 15y agoAlso, RISC is the Next Big Thing! By the way, Thin Client computing is going to kill the desktop, C++ and C are dead, Microsoft is killing Win32, Microsoft is dead, etc, etc. Flagged for no meaningful content and inflammatory title.
- sliverstorm 15y agoAlso 2012 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop. :)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- plq 15y agoThere are many reasons why the current status quo won't change so soon and an important one is because ARM still lacks 64-bit addressing. Servers have long made the jump to 64-bit, so has most of the consumer-grade computers. Without 64-bit support from its competitors, Intel doesn't have much to fear, especially in the datacenter space, where performance per watt is a powerful selling point.
- danmaz74 15y agoSaid like that this the title is pretty moot. But if you change it to "X86's Days as the only Personal Computer CPU Microarchitecture are Numbered" the author could have a point.
- jimbobimbo 15y agoIt's more of a "AMD days are numbered": instead of having competition with one serious cometitor, they go head-on with a few serious cometitors using new (commercially for AMD) architecture.